Hi! I’m Andy.

I write random thoughts.

Sometimes I create things.

Latest post

Hello World

So how did this website come to life?

I’m interested in creating something. I want to host it so I started thinking about getting my own website up (again). And while I’m at it, perhaps I’ll blog again.

I’ve had blogs in the past. I used geocities. I used wordpress. I bought a domain (RIP andywu.org), rented from a web provider and installed blog software on there.

But its been years since I blogged. Also I don’t want to pay for a web provider again. So I started looking into what solutions are avaliable to me in 2025. And I’m very pleased to see that I can indeed get a new website up for not much money. In fact, I could have done it for free…if I didn’t want my own domain name so much. =P

So what did I do?

1. Buy domain name from Namecheap
2. Sign up for free at Cloudflare Pages
3. Sign up for free at Github
4. Install Hugo and set up a github repo with Hugo.
5. Find a Hugo theme I liked and install it to my repo. Tinker endlessly.
6. Connect Namecheap to Cloudflare, connect Cloudflare to Github
7. Build and deploy!
8. I also set up some analytics with Umami (but that’s completely optional)

This definitely is not for tech dummies. It took me a few hours over a couple days to debug and get everything working myself. But it’s mostly free and gives me a lot of control over my website look and feel.

If you’re interested in setting up something similar for yourself here, here’s some links that I found useful

• Setting Up a Static Page with Hugo, Cloudflare, and Umami Analytics
• Cloudflare Docs - Hugo
• Reddit - How I Set Up Free Open-Source Analytics with Umami, Supabase, and Vercel in 10 Minutes

So now what? I hope this will get me to create things and post them here. I also hope to blog from time to time when I feel like I need to put my thoughts to “paper”. Time will tell how this web site will grow but for the moment I’m excited to take this first step. =)